There is a group of people who have been calling themselves
the "New Urbanists." Basically, they think that post-World War II
suburban development is a load of garbage, and they're looking for
alternatives. Jim Kunstler (www.kunstler.com) has been their most eloquent
spokesperson. For the most part, I agree with their criticisms. I am also a big
Jim Kunstler fan, by the way, and recommend that you buy and read his books.

One may wonder what this sort of thing has to do about
"economics," but the city is what the economy actually is, in its physical form. It might also be argued that
"economic growth" that produces more of a horrid system that makes
everyone miserable is not good economics.

The various criticisms of the suburban wasteland (they
started appearing at the same time as the first Levittown boxes) have taken on
a new urgency, as people are gradually realizing that not only is suburban
car-dependent living a drag, and grossly wasteful, it is also becoming
something like impossible, as car dependency/big house dependency translates
into energy dependency, which is going to cause problems as fossil fuel
production enters its long decline phase. (www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net,
www.peakoil.net, www.dieoff.org)

The "New Urbanists" have been looking around for
an alternative to big car/big house/big box retail living, and have tended to
focus on the "Small Town America" model, which is basically a 19th
century agrarian format that extended up to the end of World War II. Nothing
wrong with this. It seems to have made people happy enough, bringing fond
feelings even today to those who never lived in it but see its skeleton and
representation in Norman Rockwell paintings. (And who is the painter--or
photographer--of Suburban America? There isn't one, because there's nothing
there to paint.) On their weekends, people still get in their cars and drive
long distances to spend some time in the nicer remains of Small Town America, such
as Woodstock, VT or New Paltz, NY.

Wealthy suburbs around the country still aim for a
"wooded country" feel, which they do indeed accomplish, mainly by
imposing restrictions on houses per acre that make it impossible to live there
unless you can afford a lot of land. Isn't it obvious that this tends to create
sprawl and long commutes? Suburban ideals themselves gravitate toward this
"Small Town America" format, although the end result of everyone
trying to live in "Small Town America" has been colossal, low
density metropolises. It is not a format
that works with lots of people. Which is why those with money always gravitate
towards even lower density, so
they can further emulate small town living (typically at grotesque expense), even though they live in a
big city, and have big-city jobs, which
allow them the money to live like farmers in the big city. In short, the Martha
Stewart Fantasy.

The "New Urbanists" also have another problem,
which is that they have to sell their wares (property developments) within the
context of the vast suburb, so, while declaring their horror (quite rightly) at
Parking Lot America, they nevertheless must design something that fits within
the car-dependent lifestyle. Thus, the "New Urbanists" and the
"Old Suburbanists" share two things: their "Small Tow
America" ideal, and their attachment to car dependency. Thus, I like to
call the "New Urbanists" the New Suburbanists. They have a plan for a
nicer small town/suburb. And it's a good plan. But it won't work very well for
a big city, which is where most people live.

The main problem with the New Suburbanists is that they
don't have any examples to work from. There is really only one true urban
environment in the United States, which is of course New York. San Francisco is
close. New York is not a very good example of a true urban ideal. Although it's
a lot nicer than it was, people still associate it with the disaster it became
in the 1970s. For a long time it was a sort of immigrant industrial hell, of
unsanitary tenements and general capitalistic exploitation. Today, it still has
a terrible divide between rich and poor -- the middle class deserts when they
decide to have kids, and face the choice of either the horrid public schools or
the hideously expensive private ones -- and is often a dirty, mucky sort of
place. Probably not a good place to retire either.

It's easy to see why the New Suburbanists don't adopt New
York, the only urban place in North America, as their Urban (metropolitan)
Ideal. No, it's Small Town America, which has been the ideal of people
leaving New York for over a hundred years.

Now, the funny thing is that the New Suburbanists don't hold
any other urban place as an ideal either. They don't point to a single urban place in the world and say, "yes, this is what
I want." But the fact is, the world has a good selection of functioning,
enjoyable, pleasant metropolises. Tokyo is my favorite, but it's hard to say
anything bad about Singapore (except that it's not as much fun as Tokyo). Hong
Kong is nice. The better bits of London and Paris used to inspire people --
they inspired the people who built New York and downtown San Francisco -- but
apparently that well has run dry as far as the New Suburbanists are concerned.
And the lovely cities of Italy, or for that matter the exquisite "hill
towns"? Yes, I know that certain New Suburbanists can appreciate the hill
towns of Italy ("small townŠ.small townŠ"), like every other tourist
that flocks there from around the world, but they don't seem at all inclined to
learn from the example and try to actually design and build something similar.
ViennaŠ.no? Bangkok has some traffic problems, but it has wonderful super-dense
neighborhoods. I'm fond of the Don Muang district by the airport. The water
taxis are way cool.

ViennaŠthat's soooo not Small Town America. Where would you park?

My definition of an urban environment is one where it is
easier to not own a car than to own one. New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong,
Tokyo, and Singapore fit this description. Oddly enough, it is not necessary to
be in a big city to be in an urban
environment. There are many small
towns/cities around the world that also fit this description, like the
aforementioned Italian hill towns, or maybe little towns on the sea in Greece.
Note that I said it is easier not
to own a car, meaning that one can go about the business of life (going to
work, shopping etc.) without a car. It may well be more fun to have a car, if
you can afford it, which is also the case for New York, but even in this case the
car tends to be used only every other weekend.

Hong Kong. Tough to
park, but that's not a problem if you don't own a car!

This is actually my old neighborhood, the Yagumo
neighborhood of Meguro-Ku. This is a combination of small stores, apartment
buildings, offices, and single-family detached houses. A rather ritzy
residential neighborhood, actually, and a wonderful place! I didn't own a car
for five years, and it was heaven.

Here's a satellite photo of Phoenix, Arizona. Believe it or
not, the scale on the photos is the same.

To round up this before it gets much longer (that will be
for another day), let us conclude that it is high time we in this suburban
cesspool known as the United States figure out how to build real cities, and
stop fantasizing about Small Town America. I think I've found out how to build
real cities, and the secret is so simple that even a New Suburbanist can
understand it. Here it is:

Really narrow
streets.

Go ahead, go to all the urban places you love the best,
whether in Tokyo, in the Italian hill towns, in SoHo in New York or the Upper
West side, Greenwich Village, downtown San Francisco, Waikiki (to some degree),
Vancouver, Paris, the local indoor shopping mall or wherever, and the common
denominator between them all is really narrow streets. Try it, you'll see what
I mean. I honestly believe that if you have really narrow streets, the rest
will take care of itself. Narrow streets = things are close together = easy to
walk = hard to park = hard to drive = no wasted space = a city full of
"stuff" rather than "non-stuff" like parking lots,
superwide roadways and throwaway greenery = architecture that is to be
appreciated by a close-up pedestrian rather than from a helicopter or an
interstate highway = lots of fun.

Yes, there are cities with wonderful "Grand
Boulevards," and realistically you are going to need a way for trucks to
get around to supply the stores and whatnot, but what you want are a handful of
"Grand Boulevards" combined with swathes of neighborhoods with really
narrow streets, which is where the action is. Sort of an artery-capillary
effect. Like central Paris. Look for yourself.

People often get confused about "consumption" and
believe that living in cities is more consumptive of natural resources than
living in the country. This is because it typically costs more money to live in a city than in the country.A big-city job lets you indulge in lots
of "conspicuous consumption," like spending $60 for a t-shirt instead
of $5. The fact of the matter is, however, that living in an urban environment
is less consumptive of resources, which is probably why people living in urban
Europe and Japan consume half the
energy per capita of those attempting to live in "Small Town America"
in the United States! Yes, you can run your car on biodiesel (at a vast cost of environmental
destruction as tropical forests are mown down to grow palm oil for
biodiesel use), but it is better to take the train, which uses 1/10th
the energy per passenger/mile as an automobile, plus you'd be traveling fewer
miles, because you wouldn't be coming in from your Small Town in the Suburbs.

If you want people to "get out of their cars," you
can't abandon them in the middle of a car-dependent wasteland like the US
suburbs. The way to get people to not drive is to entice them to a location
where it is easier to not own a car than to own one -- in other words, it is
time to build real cities, and not supergigantic "Small Towns."
Unlike New York, the cities will have to be livable throughout one's lifetime,
which, in practical terms today, means good schools, whether public or publicly
supported, through perhaps a voucher program. There has been some evidence that
people are sick and tired of suburbia, and ready to migrate to somewhere more
urban, because, quite simply, it's more fun. Thus, all the condos going up on
Miami Beach!